Hard to ignore - Climate Rush Bristol make a racket at the Department for Transport

On June 27th we took the messages of the people of Bristol right to the doors of the Department for Transport to make sure they couldn’t be swept under the carpet.The consultation on rail fares (Rail Fares and Ticketing Review), which closed the following day, was about proposals to increase rail fares and reduce funding for ticketing staff. UK rail fares are already the highest in Europe on most routes, and are set to rise over the next three years. As high fares and poor service are the biggest barriers to people using public transport it’s clear that fair fares are crucial to breaking our dependency on cars, which has been shown to have a strong negative impact both socially and environmentally.Given our polite and non-violent approach we were pretty surprised at the panic that we caused in the DfT security staff, who hurried to lock the doors when we started to read out the opinions and stories of people that we spoke to in Bristol, and then removed us from the lobby when we tried to deliver our consultation responses at reception! We had explained to them what we were planning to do, but apparently this was so threatening that we had to be locked out. Eventually after speaking to several members of staff and people at the office for meetings we persuaded someone from the press office to come down to meet us and collect our letter to the DfT, and the consultation responses which we had written up on big cards. Just goes to show that even a small action makes us hard to ignore, and that even a non-confrontational response from the people can unsettle the policy-makers.